The caption accompanying this NY Times article picture of a street vendor selling bottled-water reads “Many sidewalk peddlers are doing record business, though the city considers it against the law to sell water without a license.”
I think Brad Spangler’s timely Facebook status update expresses how one should react to this:
Note carefully that states will be glad to bust down doors, “sweep streets” and so on in order to combat the problem of child prostitution. What states will not do is stop making the only choice for many prostitution or starvation, by impoverishing the populace with taxes, regulation and the sclerotic choking off of economic opportunities other than prostitution.
